The interplay between history, politics and memory is always bound np in the conditions of the present. The same can be said for public national reconciliation projects that seek to address wounded national pasts and lay groundwork for hopeful futnres. When we first began work on this chapter, it was in the tnrbulent months before the Howard government's intervention into Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory. It seemed to us in early 2006 that the suspiciously bright veneer of the Howard government's 'new' approach to Indigenous affairs was already peeling, revealing under its hasty application a potentially dangerous agenda for the aspirations of Aboriginal Australians for land justice and sovereignty.